Friday Focus: At the intersection of vision, passion, and grit
January 16, 2020
— by Evon Peter, vice chancellor for rural, community and Native education
“If you want to live a good life, you have to work for it.” Those were words my late grandmother Katherine Peter shared with me in her 90s. She had a very challenging life. Having lost her mother to tuberculosis and father to the influenza pandemic as a young child, she was adopted by a neighboring tribal chief. In that village she had to learn to speak a completely different language from the one she was raised speaking. She went on to learn the language, Gwich’in, so well that she later became a foremost expert of the language. She worked for a couple decades helping to document and write Gwich’in with the Alaska Native Language Center. One of her books, “Neets’aii Gwiindaii,” written in Gwich’in on the left page with English translation on the right, went on to earn her an American Book Award. It is her story following an arranged marriage and travels up to the Arctic Village area in the 1930s.
Despite the many hardships my grandmother faced in her life, she had a clear vision for the future of her family and people. She knew that our Indigenous languages, cultures, values, knowledges and identities, as well as Western education, were all important to the future of our people. She dedicated her life to be a reflection of her vision and expectations for her family and others around her. She had a tough life and had to overcome personal and systemic violence, discrimination, and belittling to stay on track to contribute to a better future for her family and peoples. And that’s what she chose to do.
When I reflect on her life it inspires me to remain steadfast in carrying forward her legacy and building upon it. When I look across our university, I see similar reflections of dedication at the intersection of vision, passion, and grit. Despite the recent challenges that we have and continue to navigate, strategic planning and implementation of visionary pathways are being worked on and producing results across UAF.
The Interior Alaska Campus (IAC), Chukchi Campus, School of Management and College of Liberal Arts have joined together to help students develop the skills and knowledge to move social media beyond recreational use into career opportunities through a newly proposed occupational endorsement in content creation. This emerging field attracts those who are currently immersed in or aspiring to enter into various content creation platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook. IAC was recently awarded a 5-year, $1 million collaborative Title III U.S. Department of Education grant to equip students with skill sets that will enable them to enter into various digital content creation platforms and learn how to run the accounts they create as an effective business. This is the first program of its kind in the state and reflects a dynamic collaboration across the university.
In July 2019, the CTC Early Childhood Education Program was successful in achieving accreditation through the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). It was a seven-year process by the faculty and staff, which included revising the vision, articulating a unified mission, and developing a conceptual framework that visually captured the essence of the program. Patty Meritt, ECE program coordinator said, "At UAF we are thrilled to now offer students an NAEYC accredited AAS degree in Early Childhood Education. Since the program is offered in multiple delivery modes, students take classes from anywhere in the world as long as they have internet access. Because NAEYC accreditation is widely recognized as providing a high-quality program, when graduates complete this degree, they can be confident they have the knowledge and skills to succeed." This is a prestigious accomplishment that reflects our excellence in ECE and will result in increased enrollment. In fact, we just had a student in Germany complete her degree fully at a distance and her plan is to join us in person at commencement this May!
These are only two of many examples that demonstrate achievement at the intersection of vision, passion, and grit across UAF. As I hope to honor the legacy of my late grandmother, I am honored to be working alongside all of you as we navigate this time in our history with a clarity of vision and dedication that she represented in her life.
Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF’s leadership team every week.